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The word: Productivity puzzle

GONE are the days when researchers could spend all their time propping up the bar, or disappear for years on expeditions. Now their performance is closely monitored and the findings used to divvy out jobs and dollars.

This process has confirmed a worrying suspicion. When it comes to the number of research papers they publish, female scientists consistently appear far less productive than their male colleagues. What is the reason for this apparent slothfulness? Could it really be that women’s brains are not up to the job, as Larry Summers famously suggested during his short tenure as president of Harvard …